How to download and install spaCy

In this tutorial I explain how to get started with spaCy. This is intended for programmers who are familiar with Python and are interested in using the PyCharm IDE.

Create a new Python project (note, PyCharm automatically creates it in a virtual environment)

Use pip to install spaCy

pip install spacy

Important

You usually also need to download the en_core_web_sm file (or another English language model) to use spaCy.

What is en_core_web_sm?

en_core_web_sm is a small English pipeline trained on written web text (blogs, news, comments), that includes vocabulary, syntax and entities

Source

python -m spacy download en_core_web_sm

Once you have installed spaCy and downloaded one of the English language models, you can do other tasks:

How to split text into sentences using spaCy

How to split a document into individual words in spaCy

How to extract entities (Named Entity Recognition) in spaCy

About this website

BotFlo1 was created by Aravind Mohanoor as a website which provided training and tools for non-programmers who were2 building Dialogflow chatbots.

This website has now expanded into other topics in Natural Language Processing, including the recent Large Language Models (GPT etc.) with a special focus on helping non-programmers identify and use the right tool for their specific NLP task. 

For example, when not to use GPT

1 BotFlo was previously called MiningBusinessData. That is why you see that name in many videos

2 And still are building Dialogflow chatbots. Dialogflow ES first evolved into Dialogflow CX, and Dialogflow CX itself evolved to add Generative AI features in mid-2023